UK businesses want the government to invest more in skills. But the “skills system” should be conceived as the whole outcome from education and learning. Too many people read it as training delivered by the public sector for young people who don’t go to university. 80% of investment in post-compulsory training is by employers.

For any government to raise the skills of the UK population (we’re mediocre by international standards) means many organisations have to adapt their role in the system. Furthermore, perhaps some fundamentals of the system must change as well. That was the message we heard yesterday, when the City Growth Commission brought together 30 experts in skills and labour market productivity at the RSA, to discuss how these factors affect the ability of UK cities to grow.

To do this, we need to move beyond a shared diagnosis, and a consensus that “we need to do better”. Inspired by a recent RSA workshop in Cambridge where a leader of a local homeless charity urged participants to not just identify barriers, this write-up focuses on ‘who are the owners of the barriers?’. Several participants yesterday remarked that despite years of shared understanding and consensus – and effort and intent – we’ve never really even tinkered with the skills system; we’ve merely played with it. We therefore conclude by considering how we could build new levers for change.

As Professor Mike Campbell explained (view presentation), growth means change in employment multiplied by productivity – how much is produced for each hour of work. Skills are a key part – but not all – of addressing the UK’s stagnant productivity. Skills make people more productive and productivity aligns to pay: one of the main concerns of voters at upcoming elections.

The consensus

“Skills are more valuable now than they used to be…a key driver of growth”

Skills upgrading is important but only if the skills match those required in the labour market. There is “no point skilling people up only to let them down”. If you don’t match well, you won’t get the prosperity and growth outcomes.

You can get locked in to a cycle if you are just seeking to meet existing need: “its the economy, stupid”. Business strategy and economic structure matter. Final demand matters, as does business ambition to push up value chain and sell internationally. This is true of firms in many cities; not generally London (though likely in some parts). Businesses need to pull up the demand for skills.

“We do not have a serious skills shortage problem – I’ve been measuring it since 2001. Shortages are very severe in a specific number of sub-sectors and occupations. Where they do exist they are very serious.”

Welfare-to-work is part of the growth agenda, not just high skills, which is where many LEPs focus their economic strategy.

Migration is “the saviour of the British skills system”: employers vote by recruiting and hiring, the contentious issue is this diminishes their incentives to invest in developing the domestic and native workers.

Social care, retail, hospitality, logistics are growing sectors with low skills. But the prevalence of these sectors locally is “not the whole story” – their concentration in certain parts of the country “do not predict skills variations very well” between cities. The labour market is changing and it is “skill biased”, but jobs growth in the UK is not predominantly in low skilled jobs and occupations. Over the last 20 years, demand for higher skills has grown – it’s not a simple “hourglass” tendency and work by Centre for Cities us underway to understand how changes vary by city.

“Skills poverty” is greatest in Wales, East Anglia; regional and local variations are very large. Liverpool and Birmingham are “disaster areas” on skills. Our top urban areas – Core Cities (measured by their Primary Urban Areas) – generally underperform national average.

“The key question is ‘Who are the beneficiaries of growth?’ We want local people to drive growth and benefit from growth. I like the idea of growth being sticky to places. London is held as a model, but is utterly divided. Is London really the picture of sustainable growth? Does it’s economic footprint stop at the M25? No, it exudes itself to East Anglia, East Midlands, and beyond. People generally aren’t generating wealth and leaving it for local residents in Hackney and Tower Hamlets. The difference within places is usually greater than the differences between places; and every city has its problems.”

- Hugh Stickland, Chief Economist at Citizens Advice.

Who owns the barriers?

Its not just about policies and practices, but the policy architecture. Its about governance in cities – getting the interdependencies right. This barrier is effectively owned by central government who legislates for the powers and funding available to local public bodies.

Employers are integral. If you are going to train people, you are best to do it with the employer. They will be the ultimate judge of whether skills are economically valuable. Employers will get more on board with locally based solution and infrastructure. Why aren’t businesses investing in skills when the evidence is they can realise a return? In part, we know there is a long-tail of underperforming and poorly-managed “zombie businesses” – many of which are particularly pressured but have survived the recession; if you’re future is uncertain, you’re unlikely to invest in training. Reaching SMEs is particularly difficult; the UK has a particularly high number of family-owned and small private businesses, and public agencies often don’t appreciate

BIS wants FE colleges to control skills; “BIS see localised budgets as a power play, I don’t think it is.” Although we have a labour market (with some inefficiencies and blockages), we don’t have a skills market – we have skills institutions looked after by a central government department. Political choice theory says that monopolies lead to poor outcomes. At the moment BIS sets budget and supply of skills training. FE Colleges have a captive market of 16-18 year olds, but are often not the best place to go for adult learners. Their provision is driven by funding and quantified delivery of qualifications as outputs.

“We need competition in system. We’ve got to get a model in which if a local coalition establishes priorities, they need to be allowed to prioritise, incentivise, decommission. We’ve got a coalition for change locally – but we still can’t get any traction, because Whitehall didn’t want us to have any traction.”

While the Skills Minister would currently argue that we should try different things in different places (as with the City Deals), and there is merit in experimenting and evaluating, the group felt this should be on a bigger long-term scale; but that lessons learnt already were waiting to be faithfully applied. In this light, “cities need to take leadership, as there will always be national political change.” Indeed, the barrier here is in the DNA of government: Ministers have changed frequently, and will continue to do so.

“Skills Funding Agency has a role in incentivising new practice which combines approaches evident as being successful from different pilots, rather continue isolated pilots with specific areas.”

There are relevant relationships with transport and connectivity, which afford access to training opportunities, and a wider set of issues in areas such as housing and childcare. Getting policy-makers in these areas to see the connections with the skills agenda is a barrier.

Changes in UK occupation structure 1987 – 2017

How do we build the levers for change?

This comes down to incentives for institutions: a powerful force in changing the skills system.

One answer is creating a catalytic effect of business skills investment through supply chains. Beyond signing up as Investors in People, or developing structured and funded development plans for staff skills, organisations could insist on this throughout the other businesses who sell to them. Merseytravel did this, others could follow.

Universities have few incentives to engage with their local economy; many identify with (and see themselves as) global competitors in research and graduate employment. The barrier is patrolled by both universities and other local partners, who often market the university as an education tourism destination, rather than as the key anchor of the local labour market. Graduate recruitment is closer to being a national market, but the fabled ‘milk round’ could become a bridge to more sustained local involvement of firms requiring skilled workers.

Political imperatives in many cities call for colleges to increase participation among the hardest to reach groups, but this drives down measurable outcomes in aggregate. Colleges are scared of this, and of their Ofsted rating – even if Ofsted’s remit for assessing the courses they run only represents a minority of their provision. The concept of a value added league tablesstill hasn’t filtered through to the education system. The barrier here might be owned by the bodies responsible for publishing and interpreting data.

To go beyond the current arrangement where central departments of the state driving their own outcome measures for political points, one government representative suggested funding for skills investment based on employment outcomes not qualifications, which would incentivise responsiveness and accountability. However, this is similar to the kind of payment-by-results schemes which have been tricky to implement in the Work Programme.

Recently moved from London to Bristol, a friend of mine asked me last month: “How is life in Megacity 1?”. While she moved to be closer to her work as a retail manager, she finds herself frequently coming back to London to buy clothes for her small chain of shops in the South West.

The problem is not that London is getting too big, it’s that other UK cities are too small. This is how the adversarial relationship set up in the two-part TV series Mind the Gap: London v The Restwas resolved last night. As Evan Davis wrote “Britain does not have a second city. Instead, it has a first city and a couple of thirds…it is as though Britain has a great world city but lacks a great national one.”

As a recent report suggested, London’s ‘primacy’ – its size relative to the national economy – is not particularly unusual by international standards.

Other countries have more dominant capital cities than the UK (Source)

It’s not just population size where UK ‘second-tier’ cities underperform. Along with other factors, their smaller size means they are less productive, in terms of economic value produced per resident. As Lewis Dijkstra notes “a range of cities allows each firm to find its optimal city”. Illustrating this point with bar graphs, and noting that costs to firms (wages, rent) and workers (housing, commuting) also increase in larger cities, he likens the ideal city distribution to a staircase. If the steps between cities are well-spaced, as in Germany and the Netherlands, firms and workers are less likely to make a compromise. In short, we can imagine that there are firms and workers who want to “downshift” out of London, but can’t stomach the loss in the benefits of locating in the capital; and firms and workers who want to move to London – but are unsure they can afford the costs relative to the likely benefits. Both scenarios lead to inefficiencies: the gaps in our city staircase are too big.

Gaps between cities – measured here in 2007 GDP per person – are smaller in Germany and the Netherlands. (Source)

The solution proposed Monday night was that “the real second city of the UK is a northern, trans-Pennine strip that extends the relatively short distance across northern England, joining the built-up areas that lie second, fourth and sixth in the UK ranking”. This idea has been suggested before. As we highlighted in our Metro Growthreport last month, 22,000 people cross the Pennines every day to commute. Other research shows connections and relationships between Leeds and Manchester are less strong than we would expect for these cities given the complementary nature of their economic activities. The Pennines are both a physical and psychological barrier. City boundaries don’t correspond to their economic footprint.

Megacity 2?

So, should we use national investment in infrastructure which better connects a ‘northern necklace’ of cities?The Northern Hub scheme now underway will improve the speed and frequency of trains, but over a distributed pattern of urban settlements car travel is likely to be much more convenient for the majority of trips. Without investment, the northern trunk road network is forecast to become more congested in the next decade. Which government – local or national – has the conviction to resurrect the motorways once planned? The M64 (Stoke to Derby), the M67 (Manchester to Sheffield), or the M650 (northwest of Bradford) to slice through the Peak District National Park? Furthermore, at our seminar last week, Henry Overman was sceptical that creating a network of northern cities was sufficient; we may be better off with one city of “over 3.5 million” for ‘agglomeration’ effects to kick in.

Evan posed the difficult question as being how to fund public transport infrastructure in both London and other parts of the UK, when the needs of London are so evident. It’s easy to get upset when you consider that, on a per person basis, London gets many times more infrastructure investment than other regions. But much of London’s investment is private, not public; and London’s scale means authorities are able to borrow more affordably against future fare returns. London’s public transport network carries half of all the journeys on public transport across the country every day. On a net basis, each day, London also imbibes over a million workers from beyond its borders and a million visitors from the UK and abroad (tourists and those on business trips). But beyond transport, if government is to guide development of Megacity 2, how will specific policies and priorities change? What sacrifices will be made?

The first question is whether we are confident we can make the right kind of spatial plan. As referenced in the programme, Birmingham’s economic success in the post-war era was stunted by the Distribution of Industry Act 1945 and later the Control of Office Employment Act 1965. By 1957 the council had explicitly accepted that it was obliged “to restrain the growth of population and employment potential within the city.” Seeking the opportunity to rebuild bombed-out British cities at higher housing standards, many planners at the time sought to reduce urban densities, protect the newly created Green Belt around cities, and rely on motor vehicle transport supporting new suburban settlements such as Peterlee and Harlow. This was anti-agglomeration, perhaps even contributing to subsequent inner city decline. Only Milton Keynes – the largest of all new towns – has the scale and location today viable enough to have its own economic dynamism as an employment centre.

We have a poor record of predicting the future dynamics of economic geography, and many of the key forces shaping the UK at the moment are little understood. Despite being important long-term trends, the spatial implications of household dynamics and the changing nature of work remain largely unexplored. As more women enter the workforce, more households are made up of two earners. Larger cities offer the additional benefit of having a higher likelihood that both partners will be able to pursue careers in different sectors, occupations or industries. Some argue London has benefited from a ‘trailing spouse’ effect. For example, with schools benefiting from (otherwise mobile) teachers attracted to London by the work of their partners working in less mobile professions tied to London. And new technologies of production are accompanying different career structures, growing rates of self-employment and different types of workplaces.

This #mindthegap programme on BBC2 is beyond awful. How about interviewing some critical urbanists instead of “growth is great” economists?!

Mind the Gap barely engaged with the dynamics of the housing market, where growing anxiety is deepening the British obsession. Cambridge featured in the show as a success story, hungry for growth. Like Oxford, it’s a historic city endowed with a Green Belt and now bursting at the seams and increasingly unaffordable. London housing pressure needs a release valve, and London seems unable to provide it for itself.

The Green Belt in fact covers more land than the entirety of England’s urban areas which it was designed to constrain. It’s the jewel of strategic planning policy, but stifles other strategic thinking. For example, HS2 takes fast long-distance trains off the existing line. New commuter services will therefore offer drastically more capacity: from Willesden and Watford up towards Milton Keynes. Who is talking seriously about Green Belt release for new significant new housing development in Hertfordshire and Buckinghamshire? Welcome to a property-owning democracy.

Perhaps, therefore, we need a change in the geography of democracy itself. City growth needs local champions. Central government consented to London’s Congestion Charge in part with the comfort that Ken Livingstone – rather than national politicians – would be held to account if it failed. Lord Adonis noted last week that more people in Newcastle could name the mayor of London than their own council leader.

According to Professor Alan Harding “we have slowly redesigned our institutions of government and our major policy frameworks so that they respond to the pressures of growth in southern England and rarely see what happens beyond. We have a national policy regime that not only does not mind the gap, it extends it.” Last week we saw northern Lib Dem MPs calling for a High Speed 3 rail line across the North. The broad debate is gaining momentum and Mind the Gap was a substantial contribution. While cleverly pitched to stir debate, we need to move beyond ‘London or’ to ‘London and’. To be successful, the City Growth Commission will need to build the most important links: those between the political rationale and economic rationale for reforms which will produce a better system of cities. London and other cities will each, inevitably, evolve in their role nationally and globally.

Last week in Greater Manchester, the City Growth Commission welcomed a dozen individuals from academia, businesses and local authorities to publicly share their thoughts on the role of cities in stimulating economic growth. On the heels of the Commission’s first report, Metro Growth: The UK’s Economic Opportunity, the Commission is seeking to identify the main factors limiting cities’ growth and the policy levers needed to maximise growth potential.

Manchester Town Hall (image by Thomas Barnes)

Those providing evidence were incredibly forthcoming in their analysis of what was holding cities back, but also optimistic about the ability of cities to overcome these barriers in future. The consensus in the room was that while there may be specific issues with skills, connectivity, and housing for example, problems in these areas continue to persist because ‘one-size-fits-all’ policies are rolled out across the nation to address differing needs locally. Autonomy at a local level is denied because, as Lewis Atter (who leads on Infrastructure Strategy at KPMG) explained, “Central government doesn’t have a view at all on local growth. There is only a cost side, scorecard and resource capture. There is no sense of how interventions contribute incrementally to national growth.” For instance, cities would be better equipped to raise qualification levels and tackle worklessness if they could oversee skills provision, which is a prospect the Commission will be exploring in our next report.

Where efforts have been made to decentralise power, government should still be cautious about claiming success. Eammon Boylan, Chief Executive of Stockport Council, warned that there is danger in seeing combined authorities and elected mayors as a panacea. What may work for one city is not necessarily right for another, a point which also clearly emerged from a retrospective of the past 30 years of attempts to devolve power to the UK. The Institute of Government categorised the success of combined authorities and elected mayors as ‘mixed’, concluding that the limited adoption of such evolutionary or ‘opt-in’ models of reform signals that the shift in power has yet to be embedded.

It’s not that Whitehall is oblivious to calls for decentralisation. When Lord Heseltine proposed devolution of funding from central government to Local Enterprise Partnerships (LEPs) in 2012, heads in government were quick to nod along in harmony, although hands unfortunately didn’t loosen up on the purse strings of the Treasury – fiscal devolution creates anxiety at the centre. Drawing on her experience from local government, Lorna Fitzsimons of The Alliance Project and former MP of Rochdale, explained to the Commission that while central and local government may agree on the outcomes they want to achieve and roles they each play, but the centre often has difficulty letting go. The Treasury in particular needs to feel that the risk of relinquishing control is minimal, which is why phases or pilots should be seriously considered as devolution is pursued.

The feeling in the room was that in spite of previous setbacks, devolution of political power to the local level is inevitable. Sir Richard Leese, leader of Manchester City Council, highlighted the recent lecture given by Ed Miliband, committing to a reimagining of public services which aims to put power back in the hands of people and their local government. Leese felt that Miliband made it clear that politicians had not only been listening to arguments in favour of devolution, but are now ready to respond in a meaningful way. If the next election hinges on who can be the most radical on this front devolution will certainly be back on the table. The most pressing question is how powers should be best distributed at different scales. In making the rhetoric a reality, the economic outlook for cities will improve as cities are allowed new freedoms to pursue their growth agendas.

Today marks the launch of the first output of the City Growth Commission, featured on www.citygrowthcommission.com. Building on feedback from our launch event at the RSA in October 2013, the report takes on a striking infographic-led template to deliver the message.

We argue that the UK’s opportunity for strong economic growth – which addresses wider long-term challenges – requires strengthening our urban system. Our scale of analysis starts with looking to the 15 areas with the largest population, which we term ‘metros’. The Commission will consider the potential of UK cities large and small.

In Metro Growth: the UK’s economic opportunity, we argue that a new global picture of growth is taking shape. This is not about a transfer of economic power from North to South, or West to East. It is about the rise of cities.

The UK is home to one of the world’s truly global cities. But too many of our urban areas outside London are failing to achieve their growth potential. We will explore what political powers and governance arrangements are needed to deliver this; and how public service reform can improve fiscally sustainability in all UK cities. The report highlights that public spending Greater Manchester exceeds tax take by £4–5bn – equal to roughly £2,000 per person per year, yet metros have little power to change this: over 90% of all tax is collected by central government.

Led by renowned economist Jim O’Neill, the City Growth Commission will argue that UK cities have the potential to foster higher, more sustainable productivity, growth and living standards. Metro Growth sets the scene for the Commission’s work. It explains why ‘metros’ not only drive most of our economic activity, but shape how nearly all of us live and work. Cities, and their economic success, matter to us all.

The data tells us that we need a sophisticated understanding of the dynamics of population. For example, while both Manchester and Liverpool grew over the last decade, Manchester added 11,000 young people (under 15) while Liverpool lost 9,000 young people.

Focussing on skills, infrastructure and devolution of fiscal and policy-making powers, Metro Growth makes an early exploration into some of the factors currently limiting UK cities’ growth. The report found that:

Skills are consistently identified by businesses as a big barrier to growth. Whilst universities play an important role in developing skills and clustering talented people, graduate retention and attraction strategies are relatively unexplored aspect of economic development.

Although many UK cities are close in distance, weakinfrastructure links between regions mean that potential economic relationships are under-developed. Despite the 22,000 commuters that cross the Pennines every day between the largest metros of Yorkshire and the North West, the economic relationships between Manchester and Leeds are less strong than might be expected for cities of their size.

There remain large differences between metros in qualifications. South Sussex Metro (Brighton, Hove, Worthing, Littlehampton and Shoreham – combined population of half a million residents) was found to have 23 residents who are university graduates for every 10 who have no qualifications. By contrast, the Potteries Metro is home to 22 residents with no qualifications for every 10 university graduates.

Metro Growth concludes by looking at the wider conditions in which people are able to contribute economically. The social context matters – for example health and well-being varies greatly between and within metros. Having people will low mental well-being, and poor physical health, limits the opportunities for productive participation in the economy.

As we develop more in-depth research over the next eight months, important areas of investigation remain for the City Growth Commission. Most fundamentally, how can we ensure that the case for metro growth is connected to salient issues for citizens – how to improve living standards – and for government – how to reform public services in light of long-term challenges.

The City Growth Commission runs for 12 months and will seek to influence all political parties in the run up to the next General Election, and make the case for cities to take a new role in our political economy. Following an open call for evidence which ran from October 2013 to January 2014, the Commission will host its first evidence hearing on Tuesday 11 February in Manchester Town Hall.

Despite no formal announcement of Tristram Hunt’s ‘licenced to teach’ idea, the concept has already been constructed and deconstructed by the edurati, with especially useful contributions from David Weston, our own Louise Bamfield, and Charlotte Leslie MP, who argues with the easy conviction of a backbencher that:

“Any relicencing scheme that is the brainchild of a politician and born out of Whitehall is doomed to fail, and become just another stick with which to beat a demoralised, worn-out workforce.”

Given that almost everyone who has commented on licencing has used the ‘devil in the detail’ cliché, I’ll say that the angel could be in the bigger picture. Although I blogged in this week’s New Statesman that our school system should in 2015 have a ‘gap year’ from any new policies, I still believe that the licencing idea deserves air, time and hopefully support from the wide range of people who could together guarantee success. Here are five thoughts that might help.

1) Licencing is an ineffective way to remove bad teachers

If my child is being taught by anybody who is not up to it, I want him or her given immediate support to improve, with rapid removal if this fails to happen. Waiting five or even seven years is too long, and may create a further disincentive to do the right thing at the right time. Putting teachers into Capability, and finally removing them, is difficult, and always will be, but brave, assertive school leaders are finding ways through, and recent chagnes to regulations have made the process easier. This may be one area where academies and chains have been more effective and ruthless than local authorities, often if not always with positive outcomes. Setting up licencing as the magic bullet to remove poor teachers is setting it up for failure.

2) Licencing could reduce teacher bureaucracy

Of course, the process to gain and regain a licence is just that, a process, so will therefore come with some bureaucratic burdens. However, any licence worth the paper its written on should be a licence to be trusted – that your professional judgement is valued, and professional autonomy revered. Armed with a licence, most teachers should be able to resist some of the more mindless soul-numbing paperwork that senior management teams, often falsely in the name of Ofsted, request of their teachers: The over-detailed lesson and termly planning documents; the written justification for every individual assessment decision; the word-hungry performance management papers. “Back off and trust me, my licence is up to date’ could be a useful bulwark against the creeping growth of petty paperwork demands.

3) A licencing system should be carefully created by a new Royal College of Teaching

Tristram Hunt has suggested that the College enforces and administers the licence. I think that the College needs to design and create the thing. This means that we would need to create a college in advance of the introduction of any licencing scheme. If this slows down progress, then that might be beneficial. Despite Hunt’s rush to announce the idea, any follow-through should be slow and cautious, understanding the impact on teacher retention and the teacher labour market.

I’ll declare a potential interest here in that, although the Prince’s Teaching Institute and others have done some fantastic development of the idea over the past few months, I think that RSA could be perfectly placed to make the College happen. We have a good history of incubating new ideas and institutions, are prepared to bash the heads that need bashing, and would also work to learn from the mistakes of the General Teaching Council of England. The GTCE was an example of New Labour policy implementation at its worst – a kind of half-hearted, ADHD-riven dirigisme which built the weakest of institutions. I am sure that the RSA could build an alliance that could do this better, and not just because we have a ‘Royal’ in our name too. Pitch over.

4) Licencing should be built around the concept of ‘clinical practice’

Thisbuilds usefully on the BERA/RSA Inquiry into teacher education and research. We launched our interim report this week. Here, we defined clinical practice in education as

“the need to bring together knowledge and evidence from different sources through a carefully sequenced programme which is deliberately designed to integrate teachers’ experiential learning at the ‘chalk face’ with research-based knowledge and insights from academic study and scholarship. Inspired by the medical model, the goal is to reﬁne particular skills and deepen practitioners’ knowledge and understanding, by integrating practical and academic (or research-based) knowledge, and to interrogate each in light of the other.”

This is more complex, nuanced and developmental than any crude aim to ensure that teachers’ practices more ‘evidence-based’. But the idea of clinical practice, also powerfully articulated by the US National Council for Accreditation in Education’s ‘ten design principles for clinically-based preparation’ could provide a powerful foundation from which to build a licencing scheme which would improve, engage and motivate teachers.

5) Licencing should offer teachers the ‘power to create’

I haven’t joined the fray of my colleagues’ blogs about creativity, although I love RSA’s confidence to have these discussions in the open. I’m not yet ready to give my view on RSA’s possible overall approach to creativity in education – my five years of leading Creative Partnerships has rendered me cautious, if far from speechless. However, there is a genuine linkage between the philosophy emerging from the non-ivory second floor of John Adam Street and the teacher licensing scheme. David Weston’s blog neatly sums up teacher effectiveness as a combination of “subject knowledge, pedagogical knowledge, behavioural knowledge and interpersonal skills”. This isn’t enough. Teachers need the motivation, skills, and sense of self-efficacy to develop their own pedagogies and practices that can lead to the best possible outcomes for their pupils. Of course, innovation should be built on evidence, and all teachers need to adopt and adapt existing successful practices as well as develop their own. Although only a few teachers may ever create genuinely new knowledge, ‘little C’ creativity, the ability to generate and develop ideas that are original to you, and valuable in your context, should be at the heart of any licence – not just a right but a duty for all teachers.

The economic geography of the 21st Century is different from the last. We are at the dawn of an age of unprecedented global connectivity driven by technology. The channels of economic growth and participation this century provide a virtually bypass to the world’s traditional hubs, entrepots and gateways. Bangalore – a sleepy university town 20 years ago – is now India’s booming IT capital. German factories hum in Poznan and in Puebla, and as Bruce Katz highlights, the US is experiencing a metropolitan revolution, as small and medium post-industrial cities capitalise on their rich inheritance.

Globally, “small middleweight” cities – those with 200,000 to 2 million residents – are home to 7% of the world’s population, but McKinsey estimates they will generate 19% of global GDP growth to 2025. The UK, as the seventh largest global economy, must act now to realise the potential of its cities: the ONS defines 32 urban areas in England with populations over 200,000. Despite decades of urban regeneration initiatives from civic and business leaders, only London currently makes a net contribution to the Treasury. In the last 15 years, no cities outside London have grown their proportion of national Gross Value Added.

Birmingham at night Credit: West Midlands Police via Flickr

The neglect in developing a national urban growth strategy by national government must be in part due to the complacency that Westminster feels, comfortably astride the prosperity flowing up the Thames. This wealth doesn’t provide sufficient irrigation for business and industry nationwide. Our river of capital streams into non-productive investment in housing and consumption, led by southerners borrowing to fund both. Will Hutton made this plain in 1995: Britain needs to invest more in its future. Since then the ONS has warned that investment, as a proportion of the economy, has fallen to its lowest level since the 1950s, and 30% lower than the G7 average.

As Mariana Mazzucato has recently highlighted, the wider supporting environment for growth is influenced heavily by government. No entrepreneur is an island. Cities need autonomy in regulating and taxing business, and in supporting a skilled and fluid labour market. This reform is needed at a time when local authorities are hugely challenged. They must redefine public services in an era of constrained spending and increasing demand for health and social care. Public services must be fundamentally transformed to support people to thrive in 21st Century cities, matching contemporary social geography. This isn’t a competing agenda to the challenges of stimulating productive economic activity – it is fundamental, complementary and necessary.

Over 15 million people live in England’s 15 largest metropolitan city-regions outside London. If they are to lead socially productive and fulfilling lives, investment must be attracted and enterprise must flourish, providing jobs that pay sufficiently to raise living standards. Growth needs to deliver for all who propel it, and adapt to the increasingly apparent environmental limits.

The potential for people to work, to learn, to find funders and collaborators, will only be realised at scale in cities. Cities offer critical mass: providing enterprises the breadth of markets – labour markets and consumer markets – to grow. Currently, getting people back to work is not delivering growth because worker productivity is stagnant; we have returned to pre-2008 levels of numbers of people employed and number of hours worked, but not of GDP. If we are to address labour market challenges, this must mindful of the scale at which these markets operate.

A London growth strategy for the UK will not suffice. We must develop a network of cities to serve as centres of productivity, home to businesses which power the UK on the world stage. We face a delicate balance between capitalising on agglomeration effects and concentrating economic power, and providing assistance to people and areas currently less competitive – potentially undermining that power.

A century ago, municipal government in the UK was among the most progressive and ambitious in the world, pro-actively investing in the transport infrastructure and human capital to fuel an industrial economy. The next national government of this country must empower urban authorities and urban residents to join the global momentum of city-led growth for economic, social and environmental benefit.

The City Growth Commission asks for your evidence, seeks to champion this movement in coming months, and reports next autumn.

Credit: Prasad Kholkute via Flickr

Jonathan Schifferes is a Senior Researcher contributing to the City Growth Commission team. Follow him and @CityGrowthCom on Twitter for updates.

People who write about policy and politics tend to write blogs like this. It is text heavy, takes time to read and stretches its audience. What if there was a way of communicating policy and politics without inducing a bad case of mental strain on the audience?

Earlier today, The Economist’s Daniel Knowles posted a Buzzfeed article on the insanity of our housing market policy. It doesn’t look like this piece. It’s full of graphs, animated GIFs, and images.

It’s visually engaging but more importantly, it really communicates the policy issue in a clear fashion. Basically, we’ve made new house building incredibly expensive and difficult. We are paying the price as a consequence: economic inefficiency, house price bubbles, financial risk, personal risk, social division, the diminution of choice and curtailed opportunity. The point it most effectively makes is that these are policy *choices*.

But there’s something disruptive about this approach – in a good way. It meets readers on their terms. It is about them and what they are looking for rather than about what the author personally responds to. This policy analysis is on a site that specialises in lists of cool stuff and humour. A few weeks ago they dissected the anatomy of a Twitter storm (like a real storm but without the train cancellations). The Pricehound Buzzfeed is omg (yes, I am doing that slightly annoying mimicry thing).

Policy makers are very used to telling people that they should care about the things that matter to them and doing it for them when they are not. Maybe there needs to be some thought about how to bring more people into the policy conversation. There could be a political dividend from this but, more importantly, a democratic dividend. A visual language instead of a dense textual language could make politics seem relevant.

Is this dumbing down? Well, no, I don’t believe it is. If you read Knowles’s article, it has much more information in it than the average broadsheet oped. If anything, it’s dumbing up.

And it is being actively engaged with. I had a look at some of the leading Opeds from this morning’s papers. They tend to get a handful of Facebook likes. A piece on housing that is just as well researched/argued on another site has 31 Twitter likes and 3 Facebook ‘shares’. The Knowles piece has had over 16,000 views so far today and 618 Facebook ‘likes’ (admittedly different to a ‘share’) and 417 tweets. He’s also had two ‘blimeys’ and two ‘hmms’ too (a Buzzfeed thing).

Buzzfeed has already expanded into original political reporting and has recently hired a Pulitzer prize-winning investigative journalist. Its expansion knows no bounds.

Communicating policy in an engaging manner is hard. The process of research, analysis, drafting, and producing workable solutions is exhausting. Maybe a little more time needs to be devoted to engagement too. It’s about more than pushing things out through papers and Twitter. Really compelling use of video, data, and storytelling is helpful too. I might try it one day.

This blog has been written by Jennifer Barnes, intern with 2020 Public Services team

Today, the Healthcare Insurance Marketplace is going live. Its feels like a distant memory now, but in June of this year, Democratic Senator Wendy Davis stood up in her pink trainers and delivered an incredible 11 hour filibuster in the Texas Senate against a bill that would take us back decades (to before the landmark Roe V. Wade decision) in our fight for women’s health. After all of the media attention, the twitter support, and the hundreds of confiscated tampons, we seem to have forgotten about the impact the passing of this legislation will have on the lives of Texas women.

As a Texan woman currently on an internship with the RSA, I wanted to share insight into the Texan example of how policy making can result in perverse incentives and unintended consequences. I hope that this post is enough to pique your interest in the current happenings in Texas as well as the wider healthcare debate in America.

House Bill 2 disregards the challenges that women face when it comes to affordable health care by:

requiring doctors practicing abortions to have surgical rights at a hospital within a 30-mile radius of the clinic

While Texas has become the 13th state to pass legislation banning abortions after the widely debated 20 week mark, it is arguably the latter three requirements that are most cause for concern. Presented in the rhetoric of raising standards, these stipulations instead eradicate options. The passing of this bill is predicted to close dozens of clinics across the state (with the highest closure estimates predicting all but 5 of the state’s 42 abortion providing clinics), most notably those in disadvantaged, rural areas where alternative healthcare options are limited.

“Governor Perry and other state leaders have now taken sides and chosen narrow partisan special interests over mothers, daughters, sisters and every Texan who puts the health of their family, the well-being of their neighbors, and the future of Texas ahead of politics and personal ambitions.”- Wendy Davis

To understand the likely impact of the changes that House Bill 2 will bring it is important to understand how medical services for women in Texas, and elsewhere in the US, are funded.

Contrary to popular perception, pregnancy terminations form a very small part of what the major women’s clinics actually do. For Planned Parenthood, for example, the organisation that runs the majority of abortion providing clinics, abortions are only 3% of the medical services provided. But they are financially crucial. 30-50% of Planned Parenthood’s surpluses are generated from termination services. What this means is that as the system currently stands, many of the cancer screening, sex-education, STD, pre-natal care and pregnancy prevention services that are accessible to low income women will potentially become more difficult to fund if the legislation succeeds in driving down the number of abortions.

Alternatively, if clinics are required to invest in expensive unnecessary upgrades to surgical standards to perform abortions, they will have to choose between closing or stopping their abortion provisions entirely. Planned Parenthood gets about half of its funding from government, but there are strict limitations on how it can be used. Title X funds are the only federal funds devoted to family planning and by law these funds cannot be used for abortions. If the state increases funding for family planning provisions outside of abortions, the clinics will likely survive, but will no longer offer terminations.

This funding atmosphere has created a complicated and unbalanced relationship between terminations and other women’s wellness provisions, and wrongfully reduces this conversation to one of economics, not value read more on ThinkProgress.

Pretend for a minute that you’re Cathy, a sexually active 16 year old girl in Texas living in a conservative town where everyone knows everyone and you all go to church together on Sundays. Your church and your high school teach abstinence-only and therefore your sexual education is lacking, but you become sexually active anyway.

If this is your reality, then the likelihood that you would be willing to buy condoms from the local pharmacy (where the pharmacist is friends with your father) is slim to none. It’s quite unlikely that you’ll go to the clinic for birth control and free condoms. If your closest clinic is up to two hours’ drive away, it becomes vanishingly unlikely. If you become pregnant and have spent the first few months working up the courage to face what’s happening, the 20 week mark will significantly limit your options even if you do make the drive.

This isn’t an unlikely story in many areas of rural Texas. Here, a young girl is strongly deterred from accessing birth control and receiving an abortion due to logistics and circumstances over which she is powerless. Here, the passing of House Bill 2 achieves the pro-life agenda and significantly reduces access to abortion.

Regardless of your thoughts on the morality of early termination, an alternate scenario is enlightening:

Now consider that you’re Julia, a single mother, working two jobs to pay your bills. You work part-time jobs without health insurance and you can only just afford the premiums even after the Affordable Health Plan takes effect. While you are eligible for the Texas Women’s Health programme, the doctors taking part in it have taken their quota of Medicaid patients so this option becomes almost worthless to you. Even if you have a health insurance plan, your deductible (the amount of money you must spend before the insurance company begins to pay for your health services) is enormous, leaving clinics like Planned Parenthood the only places you can go for affordable reproductive health needs and screenings.

The local clinic shuts down and you don’t have the time or energy to drive to the city for an exam when you start noticing mild symptoms. The gas money to get there is too much and the childrens’ schedules are too busy on top of your multiple shifts…so you ignore the symptoms. When the pain becomes too much to bear you hire a babysitter that you can’t afford and go to the closest clinic, 100 miles away. By then, it’s clear that you have advanced cervical cancer.

Supporters of this legislation ignore the reality that for many women, clinics like Planned Parenthood are one of their only affordable options for reproductive care. In many geographic areas, for those who earn too much for government Medicaid assistance but lack private insurance, Planned Parenthood truly is one of their only options. The story isn’t that Planned Parenthood supports pre-marital sex and abortions, the story is that Planned Parenthood supports women and their freedom over their bodies.

The passing of this bill limits women’s freedoms: freedom of choice is nonexistent when there are no options.

I spent yesterday afternoon at the Open East Festival in the new Queen Elizabeth Park. After the joyful but somewhat oversanitised experience of being in the park during last year’s Games, the slightly shambolic nature of the festival was reassuring. The wildflowers, the best surprise of last year’s visit, were less than unkempt, and barely flowering. The McDonalds had disappeared, as had the Gamesmakers. Turnout was probably lower than organisers had hoped, but the Hackney Colliery Band made the £10 entrance fee worthwhile.

Looking from the highest point of the park (a grassy mound where one of the big screens used to be), I finally got my head around the scale of the whole “village”, which mostly lies empty, and understood the task of reclaiming every square metre for use, whether public or private. Squeezed into a corner of the massive 2012 site, Open East served as an ironic reminder that the new Park is not mine, nor anyone else’s, and won’t be for many years. It’s worth comparing these two maps to show how little of the park will open to the public this year.

In terms of thinking about the legacy from the 2012 Olympics and Paralympic Games, I’ll declare an interest as a local resident, and also having worked on the 2012 Get Set education programme last year. I did sign a non-disclosure agreement with LOCOG, but LOCOG has now been liquidated, and anyway my experience working there was entirely positive. Get Set was a brilliantly conceived and executed programme which, though careful not to overclaim, genuinely connected with thousands of schools, a few to the point of deep obsession. Working for LOCOG was, to my dismay, nothing like the sitcom 2012. The company was efficient, often generous if occasionally ruthless, and more focused and clear on its mission than anywhere I had ever worked. Unmovable deadlines do that, I guess.

One year on, it’s time for a sensible conversation about legacy. It’s not worth questioning whether the money was well spent (although my instinct is that the event could have been just as successful for half the estimated £12bn cost). However, last week’s ‘one year on’ coverage has been anything but sensible. The recent government report on the economic impact of the games seemed like Enron-style accounting, based on tangential evidence and uncertain future predictions. The Cultural Olympiad’s evaluation report is an equally dodgy advocacy-based evaluation. Seb Coe’s claim in a TV interview this weekend that the Games’ main achievement so far has been to enable us Brits to ‘think differently about ourselves and our nation’ was, unusually for him, a fuzzy and flabby response.

London 2012′s aim to ‘inspire a generation’ falls at the first conceptual hurdle. Which generation? To do what? Overall, legacy is such a tricky, slippery concept, I’d suggest that we boil it down to two long term outcomes, one national, the other local.

Nationally, let’s worry about sports participation, especially for those who currently do next to nothing on a regular basis that gets them out of breath. Sport England’s active people survey, in contrast to the frothy legacy-speak which surrounds this issue, is a breath of empirical fresh air. This showed a decline in sports participation since 2012.

Locally, let’s focus on regeneration, and whether the park and village deliver long term social and economic benefits, especially in the form of jobs, for low income residents in the most fragile parts of East London. Over the long term, this is measurable, even if causation and correlation can never be entirely disentangled.

The rest is noise; nonsense noise that should be confined to the cutting room floor of the next series of 2012. Surely there’s plans for a one off ‘legacy special’ episode?

This guest blog from RSA Fellow Mark Hewlett reflects on recent changes to the national curriculum and last week’s launch of RSA’s Grand Curriculum Designs. It builds on my recent RSA Journal article about the Modern Baccalaureate.

Educational change continues; two weeks ago, proposals for the national curriculum. Last week, changes to primary accountability. We can all support initiatives to raise standards in basic skills of literacy, numeracy and ICT: the basic “languages”. But despite grand rhetoric there is a sense of disappointment, reflected in observations in The Times the following day, by Alice Thomson, who, being a self-avowed traditionalist, should be an ally of the Secretary of State. She sought, but failed to find, the imaginative vision to spark the originality, innovation, and inventiveness we really need for our national success. Equalling Hong Kong and Singapore in maths and literacy is fine but if that is the limit of the Government’s aspirations then we are being sold short. The Department’s sights are too low, its vision too narrow. We can do better.

These views were strongly re-enforced at last week’s launch of Grand Curriculum Designs, a new CPD programme led by the RSA and the Institute for Education. Teachers, dissatisfied with the current curriculum, were reporting on initiatives which focused not on the relatively superficial regime of the National Curriculum, but on outcomes in terms of general skills (intellectual/practical), competences (the ability to apply ideas to a range of specific issues) and positive attitudes to learning: the fundamentally important elements of learning.

Alice Thomson’s reaction to the modest proposals for the national curriculum reflects the views of those of us engaged in the arguably more significant task of designing a “better bacc” (shorthand for a curriculum and assessment framework) to meet our national interest, and the interests of all young people.

Our current curricular model (described misleadingly, as “academic”) is ill-designed to achieve the aims we all want, as stated by business leaders (the CBI is dismissive of the current E Bacc), by those responsible for the public services, the arts and sport even academics, and not least, politicians, whose statements of aims and aspirations are fine but bear only a weak relationship to the National Curriculum whose assessment system deflects energies from the essential and the important to activities of marginal relevance to the aims they espouse.

Questioning the relevance of our current curriculum, whose structure made sense in the thought world of 18th century Dissenters, whence it originated, Professor John White, in a seminal RSA paper, “How special are subjects?” recommends that we must ask fundamental questions about the purposes of education, for example as considered in “The Point of Education” (Matthew Taylor’s article in the RSA Journal Winter 2008) or the central question posed in The Nuffield Review of 14-19 Education, “What counts as an educated 19 year old in this day and age?” These questions are not being effectively addressed by Government at this time.

If we agree that we want our education system to develop the whole range of young people’s talents to equip them with the skills (intellectual and practical) knowledge and understanding to achieve our national economic, social and cultural aspirations, what responsible person would produce an end-of-course assessment system which ignores or at best sidelines, Engineering, Design, Technology, Health Education in all its facets, Social Education, Citizenship, the Arts, and relegates to inferior status, those social sciences of Economics and Business Studies, Government and Constitution, Sociology, Psychology more relevant to understanding the world they will live in than History, that finds itself promoted with Geography, to pre-eminence, quite arbitrarily and with no coherent rationale. Let it be noted that all these subjects are as “academic” as those currently required in the E Bacc.

This is why we need the support of the RSA, to challenge ill-considered conservatism and inject some realism, common-sense and clear thought into debate about curriculum. The RSA carries weight as a society of thoughtful enlightened people who represent the interests of all educational stakeholders – in academe, business, the public services, design, technology and the arts, promoting intellectual thought and research and their translation into practical reality, a society characterised by its constant, restless drive to look forward and outward, to produce better solutions and characterised by its awareness of the multi-dimensional nature of learning. And all with no spurious distinction of status based on pseudo-academic prejudice -which infects thinking at the DfE, and results in a curriculum narrow, shallow and unfit for purpose.

This blog aims to generate support for those working for a better curriculum: broader, deeper and more imaginative. Visit the web sites of the RSA, Whole Education and HTRT or contact Joe Hallgarten for further information.

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